Oracle Database edition-based redefinition seminar

SIOUG is excited to host the edition-based redefinition (EBR) seminar delivered by Bryn Llewellyn, distinguished Product Manager for PL/SQL and EBR at Oracle.

The event will take place in Ljubljana on May 23 2018. This seminar was already delivered for the following countries’ Oracle User Groups: Romania, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.

Target audience

Developers and DBAs

What is EBR and which problems does it address?

In general, patching or upgrading the artifacts in an Oracle Database that jointly implement an application’s back end involves changing two or more functionally dependent objects. Because each DDL auto commits, such changes inevitably imply that the system is mutually inconsistent once the patching begins and that its integrity is regained only when patching completes. Before EBR, your only option, therefore, was to take downtime. EBR allows you to create a semantic copy of the live system within the same database so that you can make your changes to this while the live system remains in uninterrupted use. A copy-on-write scheme is used so that only changed objects occupy space. Of course, the quota-consuming data must be mutually synchronized, transactionally. EBR supports this too. This workshop explains how it all works.

What can you expect from the seminar?

You will appreciate the conceptual and practical challenges that any technology that aims to support zero-downtime application patching must meet. You will understand how EBR meets these challenges. And you will realize that no other conceivable approach could meet these. You will gain a deep understanding of EBR’s key features: the edition, the editioning view, and the crossedition trigger. The workshop will prioritize giving you a robust mental model so that you will be able confidently to design how you will adopt EBR in your database and then implement EBR exercises to meet your zero-downtime patching requirements. To complement the mental model, you will be shown the SQL statements and PL/SQL subprogram calls that you need in sufficient detail to make your new understanding concrete and immediately usable.

Format of the seminar

The format is expository teaching using ordinary slides and on-the-fly Q&A. You will see various SQL*Plus demos and discuss code. But you will not need to bring laptops to do your own hands-on work.

About Bryn Llewellyn

Bryn Llewellyn is a distinguished Product Manager for PL/SQL and EBR at Oracle.

He has worked in the software field for more than forty years. He joined Oracle UK in 1990 at the European Development Center to work on the Oracle Designer team. He transferred to the Oracle Text team and then into consulting as the Text specialist for Europe. He relocated to Redwood Shores in 1996 to join the Oracle Text Technical Marketing Group. He has been the product manager for PL/SQL since 2001. In 2005, he became responsible, additionally, for EBR.

Bryn Llewellyn was part of the team that did the requirements analysis for EBR and that went on to do the conceptual design. He has been the Product Manager for EBR since before the GA of Oracle Database version 11.2 was announced at OpenWorld 2009. (This is the version that brought EBR.) He continues to participate in conceptual design work with each new database release. Bryn has presented on EBR an uncountable number of times, both at conferences and in web presentations for customers. He has advised many customers about their adoption and deployment of EBR.

As you can see, Bryn Llewellyn is THE person to teach you about this technology!

Agenda

08:15 - 09:00 Registration & Coffee

09:00 - 09:10 Introduction

09:10 – 11:10 EBR seminar part 1

11:10 – 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 – 13:00 EBR seminar part 2

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 EBR seminar part 3

15:30 – 15:45 Coffee break

15:45 – 17:15 EBR seminar part 4

Seminar roadmap

The conceptual challenges implied by the zero-downtime application patching goal

The zero-downtime goal implies that the pre-upgrade and post-upgrade versions of the application must be in concurrent use during a cut-over period that we call hot rollover. We’ll deduce that this implies a requirement for bidirectional, transactional, data synchronization for the database component; and we’ll look at what this implies for the whole application stack—through the connection pool and up to the browser.

The core teaching

We’ll sketch a simple case study upon which we’ll hang the teaching. Then we’ll cover these fundamental topics:

the edition

the editioning view

the crossedition trigger

readying the database to use EBR.

We will define the crucial terms of art editioned object and noneditioned object and—critically—we’ll appreciate why we end up with a rule that we call the NE-on-E prohibition. We’ll realize why we therefore need a deliberate, explicit operation to allow a user to own editioned objects. We’ll realize, too, that we must rename all tables and regain their former names with covering editioning views. We’ll appreciate, therefore, that adopting EBR requires a specific, one-off, “technical” upgrade of your database’s application objects and that this must be done in downtime. The explanation, so far, will remain at the conceptual level, so we won’t yet see any SQL syntax. We’ll step through the case study—entirely in pictures—and see how the apparatus supports hot rollover and therefore lets us meet our zero downtime patching goal.

Explaining the SQL statements that implement an EBR exercise

Now that we have a solid conceptual basis, we can step through a slightly different case study—but this time using SQL*Plus. This will not only demonstrate the SQL syntax and semantics; it will also expose some more important conceptual challenges and their solutions. We’ll realize that any demonstration of EBR must take place in the presence of simulated, and uninterrupted, insert, update, and delete activity from ordinary OLTP users. Here we’ll use only bare SQL statements.

Completing the study of the code example

With the understanding of the relevant bare SQL statements in place, we’ll look at a yet more elaborate code demonstration. The patching use case is still simple; but we’ll come to appreciate yet more challenges that must be met when using EBR to patch real-world, mission critical applications. Here, we’ll issue all the basic SQL statements from PL/SQL programs—and we’ll appreciate why this approach is recommended.

The registration fee for the seminar is 138,00€ + 22% VAT, and includes access to the seminar, all refreshments and lunch. Parking is also guaranteed. SIOUG members have a 10% discount. Based on your application, we will issue a receipt.

It's possible to cancel the attendance with no additional costs up to 3 days before the seminar. In case the cancellation is made at a later time, 30% of the application fee will be withheld. Cancellations must be sent in writing to the following e-mail address: [email protected].

Additional information

In case you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to contact me: Jure Bratina ([email protected])